Google Apps for Domains - Mail

Continuing my review of Google's services. I'm currently looking at Google’s Apps for Domains. I've been using this service now for a few months - since Beta. I have to say that once again I'm more than impressed with this free offering from Google. I decided to give this a shot with my consulting domain (http://www.tdmatthews.com) and signed the domain up for the Mail service. With a simple change to the MX record of my DNS, I've pointed my incoming mail to the Google mail servers. Now I can create up to 25 accounts each with a storage limit of 2GB. Amazing. Setup is simple and can even be automated using an uploaded spreadsheet.

I haven't had a single glitch with the service, I can get my mail anywhere in the world at any time using one of the best web mail clients around, and even have the option to download my mail into a mail client using the POP3 connection. Even the GUI can be branded to a degree with a corporate logo.

Bolted on top of this main service is Calendaring (which may warrant a review of its own), and chat. The calendar is incredibly easy to use, has cell phone integration - that works with Canadian carriers - and map services from Google maps .

For a small firm I can't think of a better option. As an added benefit you could use this as a DR mail service. Setup your hosting provider with all mail accounts, and then use the automated spreadsheet option to do the same in Google. In the event of a major outage to your hosting provider your mail is still available with a simple DNS change. I think you'll find with a little time on the service that it will be your primary solution using your hosting provider as the backup system.

Google continues to dominate and impress in the internet space, and for the price, the services they provide are top notch.

What's next for Google? Hmmm, a phone service ala Skype (with in and out numbers and voicemail) would provide the underpinning for the virtual office of the future. You hear that Google?

Trevor Matthews
http://www.tdmatthews.com/
http://www.tdmhost.com/

Analyzing Your Site Traffic

For a while now I've been using the free Google tools and have been promising reviews as I go. Today I'd like to talk a little about Google Analytics. Previously I've used WebTrends in the corporate environment as well as tools such as WebLog Expert for smaller personal sites.

Analytics is free after registration of a Google account and works by embedding a very small piece of JavaScript at the bottom of your page. The script has a unique identifier that identifies the site as belonging to your profile and each and every time the page is loaded the script makes a call to a collection sever and transfers the 'log' information.

The reports are quite good and allow for real time reporting as well as custom date ranges similar to the way WebTrends does. The advantage of this type of collection is that logs do not have to be downloaded and processed and allow for viewing anywhere, anytime.

Additionally the reports can be made viewable to other Google account holders if there is another group interested in monitoring the growth and usage of the site.

While there are numerous options available for log analysis, some much better, I find that the Analytics implementation addresses 90% of my reporting requirements, and for the price you can't go wrong.


Trevor Matthews
http://www.tdmatthews.com
http://www.tdmhost.com